Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Ferguson so far

Initially, we hear that a white cop shot a black, unarmed, freshly minted high school graduate. The pretense was something like jaywalking, but of course the real impetus was irrational racial prejudice. The cop was white, the 'victim' was black. What more do you need to know?

In response, a feral gang of youths (or teens, or whatever--insert the euphemism of your choice here) violently began looting and destroying local businesses. And if not naturally, they did so at least understandably--that is, after all, what civilized people do when they feel aggrieved. They smash stuff!

Those who focused on the mob violence were accused of missing the real story, the lack of "social justice", preferring instead to allow their own lying eyes to maintain the vicious stereotypes they'd constructed and maintained in their own minds--the sorts of heuristics that tell them blacks are nearly eight times as likely to commit violent crimes as whites are. That these facts are, well, facts, isn't important. What is important is that they are Racist and therefore should be dismissed out of hand.

That narrative started to fall apart immediately. Against the wishes of the US Justice Department, local sources managed to get a hold of convenience store footage showing Michael Brown filching from and then bullying an ethnic store clerk. It's unfortunate the public was able to view the footage, but we should still be grateful that our government is doing all it can to protect our right not to know.

"Character assassination!" came the cries of professional race hustlers and shakedown artists, as though content of character is irrelevant in evaluating an event in which eyewitness accounts differ as to what exactly transpired. It clearly wasn't irrelevant to the mob of looters who errantly targeted an uninvolved QuikTrip under the faulty presumption that it was the store that had reported Brown's cigar theft.

"The cop didn't know Brown was suspected of stealing!" That may be utter bullshit on its face, as the cop, Darren Wilson, conceivably could have put two and two together after seeing Brown and his friend walking in the middle of the road with a box of cigars. But even if Wilson was unaware for the duration of the encounter, Brown knew what he had done and acted accordingly in his confrontation with Wilson.

The Ferguson police department says it has over a dozen witnesses who claim Brown was charging Wilson when he was given the coup de grace.

Even if the Establishment finally gets some 'good news' (ie, Wilson acted out of line, justice wasn't served, and an abuse of police power occurred) on this last account, it makes for a pretty pathetic illustration of what Steve Sailer describes as putatively being "one of the Defining Events of Our Time, a Searing Indictment of the National Crisis of the White Racist Power Structure Murdering Black Babies." Rather, it's "just another local police blotter item of crazy ass behavior in the ‘hood? I don’t care what race you are, if you are in a dispute with a cop and thrust your head into his police car and then his gun goes off hurting and no do doubt scaring him, it’s highly likely additional bad things are going to happen."

In a country of 320 million people, this is the story the Establishment chooses to spotlight in its ongoing effort to spin a story diametrically at odds with the empirical realities on the ground? Again, Steve:

"[The Establishment] needs Incidents, ideally involving white men murdering innocent blacks. But, that just doesn’t happen much, our entire system is obsessed with punishing it when it does happen, and the Obamas and Holders and the press are dependent upon potential examples being brought forward to their attention by mobs exacting pogroms upon convenience stores for snitching. And mobs are notably bad at careful evaluation of the evidence."

The desperation to impugn middle class white America would almost be funny if it weren't so dangerous. Twenty years ago, Ferguson was predominantly white. Then Section 8 housing was imposed on the southeast side of the city. Predictably crime, poverty, illegitimacy, and uncivic behavior all increased. Whites began fleeing, and now the place is in the process of becoming unlivable by middle class American standards. This stuff is so drearily predictable, which is why everyone is so obsessed with 'location, location, location' when deciding upon where to live. The only way to avoid this stuff is to stay a step ahead of it. The Decline and Fall of the American Republic is being written as we speak.

Parenthetically, the complaint about the police being overly militarized is a non-starter. If you're in a battle, you need to be in it to win. The access to 'excessive' force is not a problem, it's a necessity. Arbitrarily trying to handicap the situation so that criminal elements have a fighting chance against the police is madness. That said, it need also be noted that this issue is separate from the one of police abuses of power, which is of course a problem to varying degrees in various locations and situations.

6 comments:

I think our overlords are sophisticated enough to send two different messages to two different populations.

Police militarization is a problem- these SWAT teams invade people's homes. It is unconstitutional and it often effects innocent people. They get addresses wrong sometimes.

But, by carefully picking which dead black man to protest about, they can convince most conservative minded people that the police need this stuff, while continuing to stoke black anger.

But look at it again: the police in the 70s & 80s would have stopped this crap by now, but we've got a bunch of over militarized police who appear unable to stop it now. Why? Because the longer this is on Middle America's TV screens the more they are going to think they want APCs between them and the black neighborhood.

Yes, this was likely a legit shooting, but the militarization of police is a different issue, one you are more likely to find out about when a flashbang goes off in your kid's room at four in the morning.

I saw a commenter in a recent Steve thread wondering why, with at least a handful of legitimate white-on-black authority violence occurring out in the real world, the track record on these cases is so atrociously bad. It's an intriguing idea, anyway.

I am surprised (encouraged, really) by how many white people I know of the type who generally recoil from anything with a racial element to it who are upset about the cop's portrayal and the accompanying bogus racism narrative that grew up around it in the first week. It feels a lot different than even the Trayvon Martin case. I don't know if that's nationwide or if geographic proximity is a big reason.